You’ve probably already heard the buzz about Core Web Vitals and its upcoming impact on SEO (and multilingual SEO). You might have read a couple of articles that list what you should do to optimize your site’s speed. In this tutorial, instead of explaining, we’re going to show. Watch Dario create a custom, multilingual, WooCommerce site from scratch and reach a great score on Google PageSpeed Insights.
We already know that the time it takes to load pages (Largest Contentful Paint) is important for visitor retention and conversion. Under the umbrella of Core Web Vitals, Google includes two other performance metrics – “layout shift” and “time to interactive”. Together, these three metrics are a great indication for how “nice” pages feel, especially on mobile. Google came up with these metrics not to make life difficult to developers, but to improve the user experience. After all, Google is a business and it wants to make money. For Google to make money, people need to like the results that they get from its search. Besides having relevant content, Google wants visitors to also enjoy the “browsing experience”.
And, it turns out that reaching very good scores on Google doesn’t require a degree in rocket science. All it takes it to start right and avoid trivial mistakes.
Our checklist includes:
- A good host
- Avoiding unnecessary stuff
- Page cache
- CDN
That’s it.
We created a blank WordPress site, chose a light theme, enabled caching and CDN. We placed it on a fast host (which costs us $10/month) and measured the results. We got almost 100 on CWV. Then, we carefully added only plugins that don’t waste resources and used small images.
The result? A fully custom and multilingual WooCommerce site, where everything loads super fast and passes Google’s guidelines. No special magic or hacking.
Watch the video to follow our steps. Let us know in the comments how this is going for your own sites and where you see performance dropping.
Hello, thank you for the post – can you please post more technical details about the process? Which theme and plugins you used and WPML settings.
Thanks
Hi, Vadim! Actually, all of that is explained in the video, step by step. In short, I used the Astra theme, WooCommerce to power my store, the default WordPress Block Editor (aka Gutenberg), and Toolset to build features like a custom product search and a template for displaying my single product pages. I also used the WP Rocket caching plugin and Cloudfront CDN. The site uses a very affordable Amazon Lightsail hosting package. There are no special WPML settings needed, just the standard default ones as WPML doesn’t impact performance (I test and show this in the video as well).
Great guide!
Usually we just recommend good WP hosting such as WPEngine/Kinsta/Site Ground which already have most of the optimizations built-in so it’s basically plug and play. As long as you don’t do “crazy” things like bloating the site with a lot and/or inefficient plugins, 3rd party scripts or adding many large images (or videos) to the site you are pretty much good to go.
Thanks, Aj! Yes, I couldn’t agree more. I once even watched a meetup talk where the guy was complaining about performance. And then showed the gazillion of plugins installed on the site. 🙂
Good afternoon,
I have a multi-language website using the WPML plugin, and I noticed that the media are saved in two different libraries. Does this mean that I have twice media on my server? Can this slow down the website?
Can I manage the media in a way that they won´t slow down it?
Hello,
If media are managed by WPML, only one physical copy of an image is stored and you can translate the image’s title and alt. If you see double copies of your images maybe there is something wrong set up on your site. How WPML manages images doesn’t slow down your site.
Very interesting and we love wpml especially for this SEO advantages in our WordPress projects at digitaleformate.